Besides, in Denver he could be near his sons. He may have lost everything else important to him, but he never stopped loving his boys. He taught them to play tennis, and he taught them to love music as much as he did. And Cathy, who had custody of the boys, cooperated; although she might be concerned by the example he set, she would not prevent the boys from knowing their father.
"The highest I've ever been had nothing to do with drugs," Bobby says. "It was watching my son Brian being born. I said to myself then, 'This is the most special thing to ever happen to you.' I didn't know--not really--that people were capable of creating such a miracle."
The decade following his divorce passed in a blur of whiskey, drugs, women and music. The bands changed as rapidly as 45s in a jukebox. So did the women, most of whom shared his addictions to drugs, alcohol and self-destruction. In 1992 Bobby was arrested on charges of domestic abuse and assault. "It was a scuffle in the house. I slapped her," he recalls. "I felt like shit when my head cleared. I don't believe in hitting women. And it's no excuse to say the violence went both ways."
Every once in a while, his hepatitis would flare up. Bobby had first been exposed to hepatitis B when he was sharing needles in the Seventies; over the next twenty years he was exposed many more times, and he eventually contracted hepatitis C. The doctors warned that he was ruining his liver--that if he didn't give up the drugs and alcohol, he'd need a transplant or die young. But Bobby shrugged off their warnings.
He wanted the drugs enough that he lost what little he had left. The house he'd shared with Cathy. Furniture. Guitars. Bobby lived wherever anyone would take him in; he never owned his own place again.
But the effects of heroin or cocaine only lasted so long. Bobby's only real escape from the mess of his life was on the stage. Playing his guitar, the pain went away. The music could take him to another place. It could take him to paradise.
"I don't like to use the term 'zone,'" he says. "Too many people use that loosely to mean they had a good night where they played well and the audience was like, 'Hey, this guy is good.'
"What I'm talking about is going to a place and taking the audience with you. You can't go there alone; there is an exchange of energy between you and the audience--you're bound together. It's time-transcendent. Something extraordinary is there...I'll be damned if I know if it's what we call God, but I know it's unique, and it's not there every night."
Bobby sought that place more than he ever craved a hypodermic full of smack. "Sometimes it's hard," he says. "You're having a bad night. Your fingers hurt, and you're sore and tired of playing the same thing over and over. But I used to tell the guys in my bands, 'If I can just get into the zone for thirty minutes, I'll hack through the other four hours and be happy.'"
And Bobby hacking was better than most playing their best. He didn't write much of his own music, but he chose songs that seemed to apply to his life and made them his own. "Born to Lose," "Tobacco Road," "Going Down Slow." Some of the big names in the music business--Coco Taylor, James Brown, Buddy Guy, Robert Palmer--would catch his set at a festival or in a club and seek him out to praise his work. But there would be no big recording contract, no tours. For the most part, Bobby's music was limited to Denver. His town.
He found a haven in Ziggie's Saloon. The tavern had a reputation as a rough place, a onetime mob joint, then a biker hangout. But it was also one of the few establishments in Denver that boasted live blues music.
Bobby was a Ziggie's fixture--if not on the stage, then at the bar. If he couldn't get a gig anywhere else, Ziggie's owners would let him throw together a band and perform. And when the place was taken over and cleaned up by a former federal law enforcement officer, Joe Teitsworth, Bobby came with the banged-up furniture.
In the meantime, Bobby's boys had been growing up and wanted to know him better. Brian came to live with Bobby at sixteen, when his mother kicked him out of her house because she was no longer able to control his wild ways. Michael was jealous. He wanted more of his father's attention--which gave Bobby the idea of playing with his boys, in the latest incarnation of the Bob Hornbuckle Band. Michael was thirteen the first time his dad had him up on stage.
"The one thing I can never lose is the respect and love of my sons," says Bobby. "That's when I would have nothing worth living for." He sips his beer, Robert Cray playing in the background.
